It’s been more than two years since mayor Naheed Nenshi became the cuddly creature in charge of Calgary. One of North America’s first Muslim mayors, approval ratings place his popularity so high in the public mind that the thought of a serious challenger taking him on in this fall’s municipal election seems like a political kamikaze mission.

Despite high debt and three years of tax hikes, hand-painted portraits of the mayor are easily obtained at local art markets. He even has a gourmet doughnut named after him (it’s salted caramel.)

Yet Mr. Nenshi is, in some ways, a mayor under siege in a city facing major changes.

Forces are aligning against him. A newly opened conservative think-tank is backing a cadre of candidates that could tip a delicate power balance on council. Fighting to gain new powers for the city has put him at odds with the ruling Progressive Conservative Party. And he’s being cast as an anti-suburban mayor in a town notorious for its love of wide lawns and picket fences.

I think people are just nervous about what may come

“I think people are just nervous about what may come,” Mr. Nenshi says while sitting in his office in city hall, wearing a striped pink shirt, pink tie, pinstripe suit and trademark purple socks. The 41-year-old — who was educated at Harvard and worked for McKinsey & Company before taking a job as a professor with Mount Royal University and penning a regular civic affairs column for the Calgary Herald — once seemed an unlikely choice for Calgary’s mayor.

But after coming from third place to an assured victory in 2010, he’s managed to consolidate his support so effectively that he’s expected to sweep the pending fall vote (elections for Alberta municipalities were recently changed to four-year terms from three)

Mr. Nenshi says he hopes the campaign will be an opportunity to talk about the future of the city, “whether or not there is a real challenger for the mayor’s chair, and I bet there will be.”

And even if there isn’t, he’s well aware of the importance of the other 14 council races.

An analysis of 60 key votes over Mr. Nenshi’s first two years in office conducted by the Calgary Herald’s city hall reporter, Jason Markusoff, found the mayor was often on the losing side of tight battles.

Under his tenure, the city has failed to legalize secondary suites, making it difficult for homeowners to rent basements in a rapidly growing city with two universities. The mayor failed to cut spending in the police budget and, under his watch, the council voted to remove fluoride from the city’s water supply.

Stuart Gradon / Postmedia News Files

To make matters trickier, Preston Manning’s recently opened and well-funded think-tank and school — which has a mandate to build the country’s conservative movement — is training a crop of at least five conservative municipal candidates to run in Calgary come October.

But Mr. Nenshi says he believes the nature of city politics makes it largely immune to partisanship.

“I really believe — and National Post readers won’t like to hear this — but I really believe these labels of left wing, right wing, liberal, conservative, don’t mean anything,” he says.

“Is it a conservative or a liberal idea to plow residential roads?”

Campaigning aldermanic candidates were a common sight at the Manning Centre’s patron-studded gala opening earlier this year. Reportedly, several challengers are taking free courses at the centre as well.

The Manning Centre is trying to fish where the fish are because there are so many local politicians

“I see the Manning Centre is trying to fish where the fish are because there are so many local politicians. There are far more local politicians than there are in other orders of government. And I don’t fault them for that, but I think if they actually think there’s a need for more, quote unquote, conservative mindset on city councils across Canada, they’re going to find themselves with a very shocking awakening.”

If city councils are rarely harmonious, Mr. Nenshi’s increasingly turbulent relationship with the province is more of a surprise.

Mr. Nenshi, who is trying to win the cities more authority and revenue-generating power by advocating city charters, seems to be winning few friends with the long-governing Progressive Conservative party — although his politics, style and tone should fit neatly with the centrist agenda premier Alison Redford is trying to present.

Both the premier and the minister of municipal affairs, Doug Griffiths, have accused Mr. Nenshi of playing tough in an election year, Mr. Griffiths going so far as to say the mayor was a politicking “peacock.”

“I didn’t do the spitting. I may have been spat upon,” Mr. Nenshi says, adding that he’s scheduled to sit with the premier in coming days. “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about political spin or focusing on peoples’ motives. To me, getting in a room together and having a conversation about shared visions and shared outcomes is the right way to fix this,” he says.

As Calgary increasingly tries to face down its costly and growing suburbs, Mr. Nenshi was also recently embroiled in a spat with the Home Builder’s Association.

Calgary is a city long on urban sprawl, its suburbs stretching kilometres out of the city core, its downtown streets dead past 6 p.m.

Change is coming, Mr. Nenshi admits. And not every Calgarian is going to support the mayor’s push for more inner-city condos and suburbs planned with access to light rail transit.

“For many, many years more than 100% of Calgary’s growth happened in new neighbourhoods. Even in a year like 2005, when Calgary’s population exploded, the majority of neighbourhoods in Calgary lost population. We can’t do that,” he says. “It means you’re closing schools in one neighbourhood to build them in another neighbourhood where all of those kids will be too old to go to that school five years after its built.”

In February, the mayor booted all the representatives from the Calgary Home Builder’s Association off city committees after the group accused the mayor of implementing a “suburban development freeze.”

Still, if Mr. Nenshi has proven anything it’s that he has a way of patching things over and making friends.

The mayor rescinded his previous order and and is now working co-operatively with the builders.

“I want the building industry to be deliriously successful. I want them to be crazy wealthy because their prosperity is a symptom, or a symbol I should say, of the prosperity of the whole community,” he says. “We want them to do really well, but we have to do so in a way that doesn’t mortgage our kids and grandkids into enormous amounts of debt.”

Mr. Nenshi may have to apply that same charm in October and beyond to see his vision to fruition.

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